What can a cancellation policy actually do?
It can set expectations, and it can define a process. That is the whole of it.
A policy can say what counts as notice and who receives it. It can say how a makeup gets offered, who approves it, and how long the offer stays open. It can say what happens when nobody has an open hour, which is the part that is easiest to leave out.
What it cannot do is compel a family. A parent whose kid was up all night is not going to be argued into a Tuesday afternoon by a paragraph they signed in March. Writing the policy as though it has that power mostly means it gets ignored the first time it matters.
A good test before you publish: could you read any sentence in it out loud to a family in a hard week without flinching? If not, rewrite that sentence.
How should the policy word a makeup session?
As something offered, not something owed.
The difference is not cosmetic. A makeup that is offered leaves the family in the decision seat: they can take the block, ask for a different one, or take none. A makeup that is booked on their behalf and then announced is a calendar invitation with the clinic’s assumptions attached, and families read it exactly that way.
So make the sentence plain. When a session is cancelled, the clinic will offer a makeup block when one is available, and the family decides whether to accept it. No approval, no session.
In Infinite Suite OS that is not a promise in a document, it is a step in the engine: no recovered hour reaches a family calendar without their yes. A clinic running this on paper can hold the same rule. Either way, write it down.
What counts as notice, and who has to receive it?
Define it, because "let us know" is not a definition.
Name the channel: a call to the front desk, a message in the parent portal, a text to a specific number. A voicemail left before dawn on a line nobody checks until mid morning is a dispute waiting to happen, and that one is on the clinic, not the family.
Name the window in hours, name it once, and then use the identical wording everywhere a family reads it: the handbook, the intake packet, the portal, the reminder message. Pick the window your own staffing and your own payer contracts can support, not the one a template handed you.
And say what the window is for. It is not a trap. It is the lead time your team needs to have any chance of doing something useful with the hour.
How long should a makeup offer stay open?
Long enough to be real, short enough to be usable, and never past the end of the authorization period.
That last constraint is the one that quietly kills makeups. An hour rescheduled past the end of the authorization is not a makeup, it is a scheduling change that leaves a plan short and lands outside the period the authorization covers. If your offers can drift, say in the policy that they cannot drift across that boundary.
So the policy should name three things: how long the family has to respond, what happens when they do not, and the hard outer edge of the authorization period, which decides what happens to units left unused. Expired offers should close cleanly instead of sitting in a list forever, because a stale offer is worse than no offer. It looks like coverage that is not coming.
And nothing here counts as recovered until the session is actually delivered. A booked makeup is a promise, and promises cancel too.
Where does scheduling software fit into a cancellation policy?
It carries the mechanics the policy describes, and it should be honest about which mechanics those are.
When a family cancels in Infinite Suite OS, the cancellation opens a recovery path instead of a hole. A makeup block is offered, qualified technicians can claim it, and the family approves it before anything reaches their calendar. There is no slot to fill and nobody is placed into a family cancellation.
A staff callout runs the other direction. The hour still belongs to the child, so it posts as an open hour that qualified technicians may choose to claim. Nothing is auto-assigned, and nobody is assigned to a shift.
At booking, authorization caps and daily unit limits are checked, so a makeup cannot be booked past that cap or past that day's limit. That is a narrow check about approved time, and it is the whole of what the recovery path checks. Credential checking is a separate thing that lives on the billing claims gate, and it is worth keeping those two apart in your own head: the recovery path is not screening anyone’s license or eligibility.
Software in general can move a policy’s process along faster than a stack of callbacks. None of it replaces the policy, and none of it replaces the conversation the policy exists to make easier.
What should a cancellation policy never say?
Never anything that reads as a penalty aimed at a family having a hard week.
Families in ABA are not casually skipping. They are managing illness, transport, work schedules, siblings, and a kid who some mornings cannot get in the car. A policy that treats every cancellation as a compliance failure is reading the wrong cause into a hard week, and the family will hear it in the wording.
Never anything about hours. A cancellation policy is an operations document. It has no business naming, adjusting, or implying a target for a child’s hours. The BCBA owns the plan, and the policy should say so and then stay out of it.
Never promise a makeup you cannot staff. If every room is short and nobody has a free hour, no policy and no tool invents one. Put that in the document plainly: a makeup is offered when one is available. A family told the truth once will believe you the next time.
Then send the draft to whoever handles your payer contracts, and to counsel if fees or attendance terms are anywhere in it. Payer rules and state rules vary, this page is not legal or billing advice, and what your agreements allow is a question only your own agreements answer. If you are writing this before the clinic opens, the new ABA clinic software stack page covers the same decision at that stage.